With summer in full swing, your guests are hitting the pool during the day. They want to get outside and soak up the rays. Why not take advantage of it to increase food and beverage sales by providing food and bar service to guests lounging poolside during the daytime?
At night your poolside bar can extend your lounge onto the pool deck – people don’t need to be swimming to enjoy being outside on a beautiful summer evening.
Beyond being a way to increase revenue, it can be a valuable service to guests that improves their experience. Bars are sociable, cheerful places where you can get chatting to other guests without having to pull your lounger over to theirs, or lift their sunglasses to see whether they’re awake. Having a bar out by the pool provides a gentle unpressured social buzz and improves the whole holiday experience.
However, if you’re not already set up to serve food and drinks outside, this can be difficult to implement.
Having waiter service poolside without a permanent location to serve drinks and food can be – and we probably don’t need to tell you this – hectic. You can have two, three, four waiters on the run – then it all goes quiet – and then one person orders a drink and everyone gets thirsty at the same time again. All of a sudden, they’re testy because they had to wait for service. The worst case scenario is that in attempting to provide another service to your guests, you’ve created a headache for yourself and an unsatisfactory experience for them.
A portable bar allows you to much more easily add food and beverage service poolside.
Easier to Manage
Having a bar outside with a bartender on duty means a lot less waiter-juggling. When the sun is shining and the pool area is busy, the bar is stocked up and wheeled out. When the pool area goes quiet, the bar is wheeled in again, restocked and locked safely in a storeroom, ready at a moment’s notice to go back to work whenever the pool area is busy.
Increase Beverage Sales
The demand for drinks tends to even itself out with a bar in view. Guests who don’t have to go looking for waiters and can go up to the bar to get a drink whenever they want are much more apt to have a few drinks.
Another advantage of having a bar in sight is that guests don’t wait to be reminded that they’re thirsty when they see a waiter with a tray. The bar is there, the bartender is there, and there’s a constant flow of guests carrying drinks around to do that “thirst-reminding” for the others.
Less Staff
If you do want to continue using wait staff, having the bar outside right next to the pool makes it much more accessible. Where you may have needed 3 or 4 waiters to make poolside service possible from the main bar indoors, 1 or 2 may be enough to provide quality service from a bar located right by the pool.
Promoting Food Sales – The Domino Effect
It’s a good idea to have the bartender keep some snacks on hand and have menus on display. If you organize a phone extension, or even a walkie-talkie, you can easily push food sales up along with drinks.
“The domino effect” works particularly well with food. One guest sees another guest digging into a BLT and is immediately hungry. For that matter, just seeing a waiter bringing out fruit, or whatever you’re offering as snacks at the bar, can start the reaction. That’s not just good for business – that’s good service. The kind that helps make memorable hotel stays – the word of mouth kind.
Setting The Mood – Poolside Themes
Adding a portable bar to your hotel pool also lends itself to any themes you may be featuring. Honeymoon hotels can play with a romantic theme. Party hotels can do a cocktail display towards the end of the day to kick off the evening. Hotels with themes that change from weekend to weekend will find the portable bar can become a working part of the décor.
More Than Just Poolside Use
While you may intend to just use it at the pool, a portable bar can be used around the hotel for other invents like corporate parties, galas, and weddings.